10.11.2010

Dream Week: The Wonder in Us All

FD'sUndisputed Guide to Pro Basketball Historywill be officially released on October 26, but the celebration is beginning early. Inspired, and curated, by Brian Phillips of Run of Play, DREAM WEEK features some of your fastest and most favorite writers trying to crack the mystery of Hakeem Olajuwon and his Rockets.

Randy Kim is the managing editor of AOL FanHouse and former senior features editor at NBA.com. He created this lo-fi tribute to H-A-K-E-E-M while stuck in a food court at a Long Island shopping mall. He also recently made an NBA-Dischord mixtape for The Works.

4 Comments:

Speaking of Hakeem's religious life, I used to work with a guy from Bangladesh who went to his mosque one Friday afternoon and just about freaked out when he looked over at the giant man kneeling down to pray next to him and realized that it was Hakeem Olajuwon. My former co-worker told me that it found it almost impossible to concentrate on praying the whole rest of the time.

That's done. Hakeem (Akeem 2.0) was something otherworldly, a cultural and athletic outlier who co-opted a distinctly American game and made it something, dare I say it, Nash-esque in its form and function.

Hakeem saw angles as Nash and Kidd (pre-almost complete loss of what made him good and ridiculous), simply out-skilling other bigs with what appeared to be minimal effort, as the most skilled assassins do, and with an array of fakes, pumps, shimmies, shakes, shaka-lakas and other picture postcards that made The Anointed and Sainted Mr. Robinson look like mildewed bread.

Consider the god Kobe came down from on high to seek the oracle Hakeem's guidance and managed to make himself a better player in the process (excepting 6-for-24). Hakeem simply did it better than everyone else and was the absolute best player on the planet during the Jordan lapse.